The landscape was a sweet and pleasant one even now in winter when the oaks and the poplars were bare of leaves. The rolling brick-colored fields, planted with corn, were interspersed with patches of woods, where hills rose, blue with spruce and dark green with white pine. Beyond were the low friendly mountains. Log cabins were scattered about here and there, with pigs, dogs and ragged children playing indiscriminately before them. All the people Stacey met or passed on the road raised their hats gravely, and Stacey raised his in return. He was enough of this country, and also sufficiently intelligent, to have no sentimental northern fancies about its romantic aristocracy. He had no more illusions about the people of Pickens than about the people of Vernon. If the latter were vulgar, the former were bigoted. There greed took on gigantic forms; here it revealed itself in petty ways. Here, as there, he thought, it was the one permanent human instinct. He did not know what labor conditions were now at the knitting mills; he knew what they had been six years ago, the last time he had been down, and he was skeptical of any change. Yet the sight of people here bothered him less than in Vernon, it seemed. That, he thought idly, was because here the inhabitants were more a part of their country, stood out less blatantly against the landscape, blended with it—or almost. Not because they and it were picturesque, but because they had belonged to their country for many generations, whereas in Vernon nobody had been molded by continuous residence into harmony with anything. And Stacey reflected that only in rural New England and the South did you get this impression of harmony between landscape and people, as though they had mutually made one another. Really they were at bottom very alike, rural New England and the South, though each would have been shocked at the idea. Each with a continuous past from which it had sprung, to which it belonged. A tight, narrow, little past, but authentic.
Stacey was roused from meditation by a sense that Elijah had been saying the same words a great many times, and that the words were a question.
“How’s that, Elijah?” he asked.
“I was jes’ sayin’, Mistuh Stacey, as how I reckoned you’d be wantin’ some colohed girl to cook foh you an’ make youah bed?”
“No,” said Stacey calmly, “I don’t want any one. You’ll do that, Elijah.”
The old man grew melancholy. “Shuah, Mistuh Stacey, if you say so,” he replied sadly. “I’ll wohk myself to the bone foh you, but I jes’ don’ know if I positively got the time to do everythin’ jes’ right. I got a powehful lot to do, Mistuh Stacey.”
“What is it, Elijah?”
“Well, I got to look afteh Duke, suh, an’ then theah’s all that big place to see to.”
“A couple of men working on it, aren’t there?”
“Yes, suh, but that’s jes’ it. They don’ wohk ’less’n I stan’s oveh them all the time.”